In 1989, an 8-year-old named Gah-Ning Tang drew a picture of herself in a hot-air balloon and mailed it, along with a short letter, to her favorite author, Robert Munsch. Then, two weeks later, she wrote again. And then again and again: usually on the backs of used paper place mats that she scavenged from the Chinese restaurant where her parents worked in the tiny town of Hearst, Ontario.
By then, Munsch had published nearly two dozen children’s books, including “The Paper Bag Princess,” “Mortimer” and “Love You Forever” — a book that would outsell even “Goodnight Moon” and “Where the Wild Things Are.” He was famous and adored, particularly in Canada, where he lived and where, in some years, he received tens of thousands of fan letters, almost all of them from children.
Some of the letters arrived in bulk: An entire class of kids would, on the instruction of a teacher, write variations of the same message, asking Munsch what his favorite book was or what he liked to eat for lunch. In these instances, Munsch would send a single letter back to the class, often enclosing an unpublished story that he would amend to include the real names of several students.
But some children wrote on their own, and when they did, Munsch always responded. He hired an assistant to help him organize the bags of correspondence forwarded by his publishers, and he sometimes spent hours and hours a week just writing letters. Tang’s letters to Munsch were about her daily life — about how her little sister was always following her around everywhere, and about how boring her small town was and how badly she wanted to leave it. Each time, Munsch wrote back: about his travels, about the schools he visited and the children he met there.
Two years after he received her first drawing, Munsch recalls, “I decided to check out this kid to see what the heck she was doing.” Munsch frequently toured Canada and the United States to perform his stories at schools and children’s festivals, and he arranged a trip to Hearst. He didn’t tell Tang about his visit in advance. Instead, in the middle of a school day, she was called to the staff room to find him waiting for her. Munsch learned that Tang was living with her family in the basement below her uncle’s Chinese restaurant, its windows covered up with cardboard. He spent the evening with Tang and her sister and their cousins, who walked him around the town and then to the cemetery, by the highway, to introduce him to their late grandmother.
Munsch also spent time at their school, performing stories in the gymnasium. In front of children, Munsch — who could be disarmingly quiet around grown-ups — was joyful and unselfconscious, with wild gestures and exaggerated voices and an unrestrained, almost manic energy. “Zany,” his reviewers always said. But all the while, he was studying his audience: noting what the children liked and what they didn’t — and then reworking his stories, on the fly.